La Piedra - Information and analysis bulletin on extractivism here and in Colombia - November 2017

13 November 2017

Here is the information and analysis bulletin on extractivism here and in Colombia of the Project Accompaniment Solidarity Colombia: La Piedra!

La Piedra replaces The Profiteers Bulletin you may know.

This bulletin consists of an electronic version (below), but also a PDF version that we invite you to print and distribute in your circles. We also encourage you to invite you your allies and subscribe to this email list to receive this bulletin, news from our activities and “urgent action” when injustices occur in Colombia that are attributable to the actions of Canadian companies.

We put you on this list because you were on our old mailing lists or we think you should be interested to follow our activities.

Information and analysis bulletin on extractivism here and in Colombia

Project Accompaniment Solidarity Colombia

November 2017

Two Canadian mining companies are invoking the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, signed in 2008, as a means of extracting US $1 billion from the government of Colombia. For having had the temerity to protect its water resources while not doing enough to repress demonstrators. Companies have no trouble using commercial law, to blackmail governments.

In December 2016, in the middle of the night, Couillard government invoked closure on the adoption of Hydrocarbons Act. Last September, it made public the draft regulations for the implementation of this law, which should come into force by the end of 2017. These regulations allow drilling near inhabited areas and in water bodies, inclined to believe the hands of oil company lobbyists wrote them.

The Cubiros oil well had been blocked for ten days until the protestors reached an agreement with the Canadian company Frontera Energy (previously known as Pacific Stratus, owned by Pacific Rubiales) to resume negotiations which had been interrupted in September. the corporation finally accepted to resume the negotiations and signed an agreement not to file charges against the protesters.

A genocide is happening at this moment in Colombia corresponds to the definition: the systematic and deliberate annihilation or extermination of a social group possessing shared characteristics. What Colombia is witnessing is the systematic elimination of social movement leaders and human rights defenders because of their activities in the social and political spheres.

This year, the caravan organized by La Redher, a space of articulation between Colombian organizations and internationalist groups, was held in Eastern Antioquia, in alliance with MOVETE, a social movement for the life and the defense of the territories based in this same region.

Piedra, it is the rock of resistance, the rock which, placed in the powerfuls’ shoe, bothers. It is the one that, in all its diversity, constitutes our habitat, vital to our existence. It is the rock we throw. And, of course, it is the exploited rock. Extractivism, an economic model based on the exploitation of resources, ravages always increasingly here and elsewhere. It is in “Canada”, on colonized lands, that the majority of mining companies hold their headquarters. As so, the Canadian companies deploy their activities in Colombia in all impunity, and take advantage and participate in the political and social violence that hits this country living in war.

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The Project Accompaniment Solidarity Colombia is a collective which realizes accompaniment with Colombian communities and organizations since 2003, while also creating links here and in Colombia of groups and individuals struggling against the imposition of mega-projects of resource extraction.